Traps Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2013 by MacKenzie Bezos

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bezos, MacKenzie.

  Traps / by MacKenzie Bezos.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “This is a Borzoi book.”

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95974-4

  1. Self-realization in women—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.E96T73 2013

  813′.6—dc23 2012029032

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Front-of-jacket photographs, left to right: Caroline von Tuempling / Stockbyte / Getty Images; Dennis Hallinen / Getty Images; Richard Nowitz / National Geographic / Getty Images; Pixtal / Superstock

  Jacket design by Chip Kidd

  v3.1_r2

  to my mother and father

  Sweet are the uses of adversity,

  Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,

  Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

  —SHAKESPEARE

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Day 1

  1 Nausea

  2 Old Dogs

  3 Spiders

  4 Strays

  Day 2

  5 Unwanted Callers

  6 Unpleasant Surprises

  7 Secrets

  8 Injuries

  9 Long Nights

  Day 3

  10 Difficult Conversations

  11 Facts

  12 Emotions

  Day 4

  13 And So On

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  Day 1

  1

  Nausea

  In the vast valley north of Los Angeles, on a street of abandoned warehouses, behind a wall of corrugated metal topped with barbed wire, beyond an unused machine shop, in an unmarked prefab office building, inside a tiny bathroom with a hollow-core door, our first hero begins to tremble as she steps into a strange pair of pants.

  These pants are enormous—inches thick, visibly stiff, made of a fabric coarse and gray—and when she grips the sink for balance, letting them fall, they relax only slightly, a pair of heavy phantom legs leaning against her own. A matching jacket lies felled on the floor like some hunted thing, arms pinned beneath its own weight. On the seat of the closed toilet, an open equipment bag bears a padded red helmet, its dark metal face cage regarding the water-stained ceiling. And on the floor beside it, a clipboard:

  McClelland Security Services

  Contingency Stress Inoculation Training

  Dana Bowman, Years 1–6

  with colored graph lines for Heart Rate and Test Duration descending.

  This woman keeps her head bowed, focusing resolutely on the shining silver drain stop at the bottom of the sink. She is able to still herself this way, but over the course of a long minute, the short hair at the back of her neck begins to darken, the skin to shine, and at last a bead forms and slides down to disappear into the rolled cotton edge of her tank. She cranks the sink water on. She flips a wall switch, setting an old ceiling fan rattling. Finally she straightens and pulls the pants up tall, fitting her arms through the ragged straps of the suspenders in front of the mirror. Tall and lean. Short, dark hair. Eyes a clear green. Thin white line of a scar above her upper lip.

  This is Dana.

  She stops the stream of water with a still-shaking hand and cups some, sips at it, the bulk of it dribbling from her chin into the sink. She reaches behind her into the equipment bag to grab a long black strip of nylon webbing with a plastic clip. She passes it under the running tap and hikes her tank up to fit it on around her rib cage under her bra, weaving it through the suspender straps and snapping it in front over her sternum. Beyond the red helmet, in the deep of the bag, is a little black wristband with a digital display. She takes a deep breath through her nose—nothing you can hear, but you can see her chest rise and keep silently rising, followed by a long, slow fall. Then she fishes out the wristband: forty-four beats per minute.

  She shuts the water off now and takes two neoprene sleeves from the bag and pulls them on over her forearms. She hefts the coat from the floor like you would a heavy backpack, slinging it on, tiny inside it, and makes short work of the clips in front. Then she picks up the clipboard, tucks the helmet under one arm, and opens the bathroom door.

  On to a large break room. At the counter is a big young man in a T-shirt and camouflage cargo pants, his brown head shaved shiny bald. He is leaning against a humming microwave, tapping a spoon in his open palm. “Shit,” he says. “The corsage I got isn’t going to match.”

  Dana lumbers past him, setting her things on the table, and twists the dial on a padlock. Inside her locker is an oversized backpack—black ballistic nylon girded with a dozen zippered pockets. He watches as she yanks one open and withdraws a box of Pepto-Bismol tablets and fiddles with a crinkling cellophane sheet.

  “Cujo-itis?” he says.

  She pops a pair of pink tablets into her mouth and shuts her locker door. She twists the dial on the padlock again, and grabs the helmet and clipboard. The color is back in her face now, not so quickly from the pills, of course, but from some internal effort of her own. She manages to smile at him, even. “Smell of your mom’s leftovers,” she says, and she pushes the bar release on a fire door and steps, squinting, out into the bright courtyard.

  Or not a courtyard, really. A half acre of sparkling mica-flecked blacktop hemmed in by those barb-topped walls and bulwarked by the unused warehouses beyond. To one side a line of six black SUVs with dark windows, windshields flashing white in the sun. At the far end a few long runs of chain-link fence leading to a low concrete outbuilding. And at the center a man in a tie and shirtsleeves next to a plain white service van. When the door crashes shut, the little building in the far corner of the yard explodes with muffled barking.

  Dana lifts the helmet and swings open the face guard as she crosses the blacktop. She parts the flaps of thick foam at the neck and lowers it over her head, shutting the cage over her pale green eyes and the little white scar. It muffles her hearing, but right away (she will never understand this about herself, but she will continue to crave it) her heart rate slows and her focus sharpens. A paper clip on the blacktop. A helicopter banking south so far off in the turquoise sky she cannot hear it. And just before she reaches him, a flash of something at her examiner’s neck as he reaches out for the clipboard. Someone (a barber? his wife?) has nicked him with the clippers just above his collar, a nearly invisible line of fine red marks just below the short hairs, like perforations. Corey Sifter is his name. A former Marine Aircraft Wing Commander and Combat Tactics Instructor from Alabama. Who likes the chair nearest the door in the break room and eats sunflower seeds in his office.

  Dana hands him the clipboard and the wristband to her heart-rate monitor, and in turn he hands her a different wristband—no display, just a white plastic box with a single red button. She slips it on and pushes it up a bit, hiding it inside the sleeve of the big coat.

  He says, “Now, you know that’s not just a token of our affection. You can press that thing if you need us.”


  “Yes, sir.”

  “You were in there so long last year, we thought maybe you forgot. Decided you had no choice but to make a roommate out of him and live out your days in the back of that van.”

  “I like living alone, sir,” she says.

  He laughs. “Fair enough.” He riffles the pages on the clipboard and then raps it with his knuckle. “I’m just hoping you don’t fall asleep this time. Your peak heart rate has dropped by at least seven points every year.”

  Dana blinks inside her helmet, waiting. She knows such exchanges can go on a long time if she participates in them, and she is itching to get inside the van. She is still hot inside her suit; she is still nauseous. He still has the trace of a smile on his face people wear when they expect that their banter will be returned, but finally it falls away. He coughs and raps his knuckles again on his clipboard.

  “All right then,” he says.

  And Dana opens the barn doors at the rear of the van and climbs in, pulling them shut behind her.

  The space is dark after the bright outside, but it is also familiar. The pair of bucket seats scabbed with duct tape and the empty rear compartment stripped down to the white sheet-metal skin. An anarchy of scratch marks on the floor as her eyes adjust. The space does for her what the helmet did, and she kneels in the center of the van and feels carefully along the underside of the seats. She leans forward to click the glove box gently open and shut. She does not watch through the windshield as a door in the far building swings open. There is just the soft sifting of her hands along the floor beneath the dashboard, searching, and the rattle of her sneakers as she turns and steps back behind the bucket seats, while outside, silent beyond the van windows, a big German shepherd barrels out, dragging a handler by a leash. It scrabbles toward the van, and Dana crouches on one knee, extending her left arm just as the barn doors swing open, flooding the van with light, and the dog flies at her, teeth bared.

  It is as she expects it to be. The van doors slam shut, plunging them into darkness, and the dog’s jaws clamp down on the arm Dana feeds him. He has her just below the elbow, snarling and tugging, his claws scrabbling and slipping on the bare metal floor, and she pumps it in his mouth to keep him engaged as she waits for her eyes to adjust again and then scans: ceiling, spare tire well, door handles, window frames, tool kit. When she is sure she has covered it—the whole back half—she relaxes her arm knowing he will release it for a grip on something new, bored, and he does. As she turns to face forward, he lunges for her shoulder, his teeth knocking hard against the bone and throwing her into the back of the passenger seat, and as they fall together to the floor, Dana thinks her shoulder does hurt, she can feel that muffled somewhere deep below the surface of her attention, but it is precisely then that she detects what she has been searching for—the barest hint of it on the sunlit armrest of the front passenger door. The pivot lid on the ashtray is ajar. Its silver edge glints.

  As she struggles to right herself, the dog grabs her by the back of her coat, trying to shake her whole body now, but Dana can just reach it, stretching her fingers out of the end of the tapered sleeve and flicking open the tiny metal lid. And this, right now, this moment is what Dana loves. She feels almost serene, seeing the key there in the ashtray and knowing just how she will grab it, just how she will pull it back into her fist and then into the sleeve of her armor, just how she will crouch before she explodes upward to throw the dog back into the closed barn doors. He doesn’t let go of her jacket when she does it, but it doesn’t matter. When she ends up on her back on the van floor, for the tenth of a second it takes him to right himself and land with his front paws on her chest, Dana does absolutely nothing. She waits for him to come, his teeth clattering against her face guard, wild, glistening, enormous, a child’s nightmare. It should be terrifying, but she has the key tight in her right hand and she is working a boot up under his belly, and Dana shoves, catapulting him against the spare tire. It gives her all the time she needs to roll onto one knee and dive for the steering column. As he lands on her back and bites down on the fabric at her neck, he crushes her against the parking brake, and her helmet bounces on the bucket seat, but she can just reach now, and on her second fumble she slides the key into the ignition. She turns it and the engine rumbles on, and at the sound of it, like magic—like something from a cartoon, really—the dog lets go of her jacket and lies down on the floor of the van, as if ready for a nap, or a pat.

  As soon as Dana’s examiner opens the doors, the nausea returns. She hops out and takes off past him at a trot. She types a code into a keypad next to the building door and pulls it open, rushing past the big young man eating soup from a bowl at the table and into the tiny bathroom, shutting the door on our view of her.

  We are out in the break room, where the big young man has paused over his bowl of soup and the examiner is just stepping in through the fire door, clipboard in hand. Velasquez is another of the firm’s agents—he has worked protective shifts with Dana a hundred times—and Corey Sifter coached her through a high-speed-emergency driving course and an evacuation simulation in a smoke- and flame-filled room, but neither man has ever been shown a photo on her BlackBerry or heard her describe a movie she saw over a weekend or watched her drink a beer. Through the hollow-core door to the bathroom now comes the clear sound of retching and coughing. Velasquez looks down at his food, and Corey Sifter at the statistics before him. They steal glances at the door as the sounds from within change. A toilet flushing. The rattle of a paper-towel dispenser. Running water. And finally the door clicks open and Dana emerges, her face dry and pale and her hair glistening with sweat or sink water, in her damp tank top and running shorts, the heavy bite suit draped over one arm and the helmet under the other.

  She heaps them onto the break table next to the empty equipment bag and peers down at Corey Sifter’s clipboard.

  “How’d I do?” she says to him.

  He coughs. He looks at her wristband and then back at the clipboard. “Five beats down on pulse and about a minute faster than your best speed.”

  Even as he speaks she is stepping around him to her locker, and he turns, watching her. He runs a hand through his buzz cut.

  She unzips the top of her backpack and takes out a hooded sweatshirt and pulls it on over the tank she fought in.

  “Where you headed?” he says.

  “Home.”

  “What’s your hurry? How about you stop by Shannon’s office before you go? Let her check your vitals.”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary.”

  “Just heart rate and blood pressure. She’ll have you out in five.”

  “I appreciate your concern, sir—”

  “Corey, Dana. We’ve been working together for seven years.”

  “I appreciate it, I do. But I don’t think it’s necessary.”

  “Sometimes the heat gets to people in there—”

  “It wasn’t that, sir—Corey.”

  “Or the adrenaline buildup.” He picks up the receiver on the break-room phone. “She’ll check you out real fast.”

  Dana shoulders her backpack and shuts her locker, leaving it empty. “I was queasy before I tested. Velasquez saw me take something for it before I came out.”

  Corey Sifter looks at Velasquez in his place at the table.

  The big young man nods, gesturing with his spoon, his mouth full. He swallows. “True story.”

  “Something I ate, maybe,” Dana says.

  He sets down the phone. “I’ll have to note it in your file.”

  “Of course.”

  He shakes his head. “And you’ll have to be sure to report it in the Protective Asset Inventory on your next duty check-in.”

  “Certainly,” Dana says, turning.

  “And, Dana?”

  She turns back to him.

  “We like a pilot who can fly without a wingman. We do. But not if she won’t keep her radio on.”

  Outside she steps through a small corrugated metal door in a corruga
ted metal wall into a street of locked-up warehouses and garbage-choked gutters. Down at the corner a few men sit on the curb outside a taqueria, but other than that the street is empty. Just a lunch bag blowing, and a few parked cars, including Dana’s white Jetta, and a big black crow sitting on her roof. He could almost be looking at her, she thinks, and in fact, as she gets closer, she sees that he is. He cocks his head, his black eyes staring, and only when she takes out her key to open the door does he fly away, wheeling up and off over another razor-wire fence to a place she can’t see and never will. She gets in her car, locks her door, and sets her big backpack on the seat beside her. Behind her, hanging down from the hook and bending at the waist against the seat like a passenger, is a white cotton dress with peach-colored flowers still in the clear bag from a department store.

  The drive out of that valley into Los Angeles is long. And silent for Dana. She does not turn the radio on. She watches the road. And at stoplights her eyes catch on the out-of-place and the furtive: a woman sitting on a suitcase; a boy opening a bag in a dark doorway; a man in a parked car outside the high-fenced play yard of a school. She passes from the narrow streets of those closed-up blocks, to the stoplighted boulevard of the flat valley, up onto a highway that bears her between brown hills until she can see the beach and ocean, and then off and down to more stoplighted streets that draw her into her own neighborhood, Culver City, with its streets of single-story houses just big enough for an arched front door and two flanking windows, well kept every one. Neat streets. With clean gutters and sidewalks and tiny squares of clipped lawn, and then a tidy little alley alongside her own street’s one apartment building, white and U-shaped around a courtyard of vinyl-strap lawn furniture, with windows overlooking, all of them closed, save for three at the top with scraps of curtain each cut from a different patterned bedsheet, billowing out in the breeze like flags. Dana pulls into the little alley and through a garage door and down into the low-ceilinged parking area underneath.